The other day my wife and I were looking for a nice place up on Bolinas Ridge to lounge around, eat some cheese and crackers, and drink some fancy birthday wine. We pulled over at a spot we've enjoyed before, but it looked like there was a swarm of bees waiting to greet us. We wondered if there was a hive nearby.
This was an unusual experience for me on Mt. Tam, and I didn't want to drive away without at least checking it out, so I got out of the car as quick as I could, and then I just stood still among the buzzing chaos, hoping I wouldn't get stung. It didn't take long to realize that the insects weren't bees at all, but horseflies, which are arguably worse!
I swatted a couple of them off me and jumped back in the car, but one of them got inside and was going crazy. I started the engine and rolled a window down so it could escape, and felt lucky that no more took the opportunity to charge inside and bite us.
Horseflies, also known as gadflies, are in the genus Tabanus. The name was first recorded by Pliny the Younger (the Roman guy born in 62 A.D., not the triple IPA from Russian River Brewing), and it stuck. Horseflies have been found in the fossil record back to the Jurassic, and I wouldn't be surprised if dinosaurs owe their reputations for ferocity to the fact that they didn't have arms to swat the hordes of biting gadflies off their skin. As with mosquitoes, it's the females that do the biting to procure the nutritious mammal blood they need to reproduce.
We did finally find another lounge area along the ridge with just a few buzzing horseflies that let us pass without incident. As we were enjoying our repast, another car pulled in next to ours, and whoever got out screamed about the "bees" and got back in her car to drive to a better spot. We chuckled a little, since she headed off in the direction where they are even more numerous.
For some reason they liked to perch on the side of my car, so when I returned a couple of days later with my Nikon I simply parked and waited for them to land so I could grab a picture.
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